‘Sexting’ voted most annoying new tech word

Although technology has the potential to enlighten the world and bring knowledge to the great unwashed, it is also a pretty good excuse to rape the English language. Here at Fudzilla we have years of hands-on experience with the latter.

An entertaining and not very informative poll by YouGov has revealed that “sexting” is the most annoying word added to dictionaries over the last year and it got the unflattering distinction of winning Computerarchive’s “Unspeakable” award. The term itself was coined to describe the act sending sexually explicit photos and messages by mobile phones. In New York it has been supplanted by Wienering in honor of a certain member of the US House of Representatives.

The next most annoying word is “intexticated”, which is used to describe people who are unable to concentrate while driving due to being distracted by texting. With the advent of airbags, ABS, ESP and other safety technologies, it was only a matter of time before another technology came along to negate their obvious effectiveness. Basically, natural selection always finds a way.

Third place comes courtesy of Mark Zuckerberg and the social notworking revolution. “Defriend” means just that, to remove someone from a list of friends on a social network. Well, we shouldn’t really thank Zuckerberg for it, as it would exist if it weren’t for annoying people who share unfunny links and like to chat their way to being “defriended”.

“Twittersphere” ranked fourth and we don’t even want to explain what it means, just like “tweetup”, which ranked fifth. “Hacktivist” came in sixth place, and it’s usually used to describe people in their thirties living with their parents. “Clickjacking” claimed seventh place and in case you are not familiar with it, you just need to frequent more porn sites. Eight place is shared by “twitpic, “scareware”, and “dot-bomb”.

George Carlin would have a field day with some of the terms we’ve come to take for granted over the past couple of years. Sadly, he is with God now.